This Christmas retailers will not be celebrating the jingling of tills so much
as the rattling of keyboards, according to a report that shows Britons are
the biggest online shoppers in Europe.

British web users spend more than £1,000 every six months and make approximately 19 online purchases, according to figures in a new report from communications regulator Ofcom.

Online, we spend nearly twice as much as our French or German counterparts, and more than three times as much as those in Poland. Spanish consumers made just four online purchases in the same period.

Research by web auction giant eBay, too, indicates that three-quarters of all UK consumers will do some or all of their Christmas shopping online. The site expects to sell up to 16 items per second, peaking this Sunday.

Ofcom’s report suggested that the widespread use of credit cards, coupled with British willingness to trust online payment systems and a history of catalogue shopping was behind the trend. The early arrival of shopping portals such as Amazon, which came to Brtain in 1998, is also thought to be a factor.

A quarter of the world’s 2 billion online consumers live in Europe, but they account for 35 per cent of all web spending.

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Ofcom’s report also showed Britons are among the world’s keenest adopters of new technology in general. There was a 70 per cent rise in smartphone take up between January 2009 and January of this year, to 18 per cent. Italians and the Spanish, however, are even more enthusiastic, with a quarter and a fifth respectively owning smartphones.

Ofcom’s report put Britain among the world’s leaders for take up of broadband and digital TV, as well as for using smartphones and catch-up TV services such as the BBC iPlayer.

But it warned that take up of superfast broadband was currently very low: just 0.2 per cent of households were connected at high speeds, compared to 2 per cent of Germans, 7 per cent of Americans and more than a third of all Japanese. The regulator added, however, that plans were already in place and by 2015 Britain was likely to be in a much better position. Ofcom Chief Executive Ed Richards said “It’s important for the country that there are no further delays in the delivery of superfast broadband and next generation mobile networks.”